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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Proof That Military Chips From China Are Infected?

Proof That Military Chips From China Are Infected?

For
years, everyone has warned that counterfeit microchips made in China
and installed on American military hardware could contain viruses or
secret backdoors granting the Chinese military cyber access to U.S.
weapons systems. These warnings/predictions recently expanded beyond
counterfeit parts, now we’re worried that any Chinese-made components could be infected.
The problem was that until this week, these warnings were educated
guesses and theories. Well, a scientist at Cambridge University in the
United Kingdom claims to have developed a software program proving that
China — and anyone else — can, and is, installing cyber backdoors on
some of the world’s most secure, “military grade” microchips.
Specifically,
the American-designed, Chinese-made Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 A3P250 —
commonly known as the PA3 — chip was found by Cambridge researcher, Sergei Skorobogatov,
to have a backdoor, or trojan, deliberately built into it. The PA3 is
what’s called a Field Reprogrammable Gate Array (FRGA); an almost blank
slate of a microchip that can be programmed by its owner to perform a
variety of tasks.
Most alarming is that the PA3 is considered to
be one of the “most impenetrable” designs on the market. The chip is
used in military “weapons, guidance, flight control, networking and
communications” hardware, according to Skorobogatov’s report on his
findings that was published last weekend. The PA3 is also used in
civilian “nuclear power plants, power distribution, aerospace, aviation,
public transport and automotive products,” according to Skorobogatov.
(In an example of just how military-grade these chips are supposed to be, the image above is actually taken from Actel/Microsemi’s promotional material for the PA3)
Basically,
Chinese cyber spies can gain use the chip’s built-in malware to
decipher military passcodes and gain remote access to the chip and
reprogram it to do their bidding; “permitting a new and disturbing
possibility of a large-scale Stuxnet-type attack via a network or the
Internet on the silicon itself,” reads his report.
The worst part,
this backdoor, installed on chips used on critical weapons systems and
public infrastructure around the word, is almost impossible to remove
from the chip since, well, it was built into the device during
manufacturing. That mean’s you can’t just issue a software patch to
repair the vulnerability.

The backdoor is close to
impossible to fix on chips already deployed because, unlike software
bugs in a PC Operating System, you cannot issue a patch to fix this.
Instead one has to replace all the hardware which could be extremely
expensive. It may simply be a matter of time before this
backdoor opportunity, which has the potential to impact on many critical systems, isexploited.Having
a security related backdoor on a silicon chip jeopardises any efforts
of adding software level protection. This is because an attacker can use
the underlying hardware to circumvent the software countermeasures.

So
uh yeah, this stuff is everywhere. When people warn of the potential
for widespread disruption from cyber espionage and warfare, they’re not
just crying wolf. Makes you feel safe, huh?
Here’s Skorobogatov’s full report where you’ll learn how the backdoors are installed and activated.